Hurricane Florence struck Wilmington, North Carolina on Thursday, September 13th. The rain and winds didn’t stop until Sunday. More destruction and flooding followed, as rivers tried to return water back to the ocean. But the city survived.
In “Upon the Sweeping Flood,” Joyce Carol Oates puts her unsettling storytelling to work in full force. Oates’s honesty and ability give life to the sinister creatures within each of us. In this short story, Stuart, an average man with an average life, rushes headlong into a hurricane that he would have otherwise been safe from. In search of something, perhaps a disruption to the normalcy his life has fostered, Stuart is hoping to rescue someone. When he finds a boy and a girl in the street, he becomes trapped as the storm wages. In the delirium of the flood and other dramatic events, Stuart becomes a different person. Or, one could interpret, perhaps the person he has been all along.
Nature shows us how something can be beautiful and serene (a yellow butterfly gliding over the ocean), hostile and catastrophic (a woman in a yellow boat heading toward her flooded home). In “Upon the Sweeping Flood,” Stuart thinks he can conquer nature: “His mind was calm beneath the surface buzzing. He liked to think that his mind was a clear, sane circle of quiet carefully preserved inside the sanctity of this circle; this was how man always conquered nature. How he subdued things greater than himself” (205). But if Hurricane Florence has taught us anything, it’s that it might be impossible to subdue nature. All we, as humans, can do is control our reactions to the actions nature takes on us.
During a disaster, where there are neighbors donating time and money, opening up their homes and giving away resources, there are also neighbors looting and yelling at each other into the night over parking spaces. That is, there are neighbors who are happy to have it all: their lives, and there are neighbors who cling to what they have, so as not to lose more.
Wilmington is still rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence. There are businesses that have not re-opened their doors, ones that still have boards on the windows. There are still deactivated power lines and fallen branches in streets and parking lots. People are living in hotels and on friends’ couches. The city has a tinge of both sadness and survival in its eyes. Small talk has changed from “How are you?” to “Did you evacuate?” and “Is your home okay?”
With her characterization of Stuart in “Upon the Sweeping Flood,” Oates strips away the things we do, in part, for normalcy--marriage, children, careers--shows that when a hurricane hits, all that’s left is worry, raw survival and an inner compass to point toward what is right and wrong. Natural disasters push change upon us in a physical way, but they also force us into making decisions about ourselves: who we are and who we want to be, whether good or bad.
Image c/o James Pillion via Flickr Creative Commons